Diablo III Interview

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Eurogamer: I guess this is where the influences you've mentioned from enemy design in Zelda and World of Warcraft come into play...

Jay Wilson: Or God of War. Games like that are some of my favourite games. It would be far more interesting if we could have a boss monster that wasn't just a giant sack of health that deals out ridiculous damage. We've got monsters that drop health at percentages of their damage, we also sometimes spawn monsters that are just there basically to drop health. Even there: if you have a boss that just walks around and hits you, and a bunch of smaller monsters that continually spawn and generate health, that's already a far more interesting fight than you ever got in Diablo. And that's just the bear minimum of what we can do.

And then on the role-playing side, we've been focusing on more story. We want people to be able to ignore the story if they want, but we still want there to be a denser story, we want there to be a lot of scripted events that support the story, we want the story to be better formed and more interesting. Plus we want there to be some elements that allow players to feel like they're in a role-playing game. I think that one of the differences between Blizzard North and what we sometimes call Blizzard South is that Blizzard South, led by our creative director Chris Metzen, is just a little bit more story-focused. That's not a knock, but it can't help but be something that gets into the game now, because it's also a value that I have.

Eurogamer: I have to ask about the art style - I know you're not going to change it, but have you been surprised at the strength of reaction? 50,000-odd is an awful lot of petitioners...

Jay Wilson: Yeah, it's an anonymous petition, so I'm not trusting of that actual number... I think it's a very small minority of people who don't like the art style. And I actually think when they see the game later, they'll feel differently. I think there's a lot of selective memory of Diablo II - when Diablo II came out, it was panned for its art style. Way too bright and sunshiny and colourful, compared to the original Diablo.

We tried a more subdued look and the game was just boring to play, it was kind of difficult, it was hard to identify different types of creatures, it just didn't feel very fun. We weren't surprised that there was a strong reaction like that because we struggled with the art style so long. We had fights on the team about how we wanted the art style to go. We don't any more, everyone's really happy with where we're at. It's because we've walked through that process. If we could walk all of those fans through the process, we think they'd go, 'I see why you guys did this'.

What's that? Another bridge?

Eurogamer: Have there been times where you've felt that you've overstepped the innovation line and gone to something that wasn't Diablo, and had to pull it back?

Jay Wilson: Not really. I'd say we're actually over-cautious to not go over that line and I feel we should push it a lot more. Some people don't like it when I use this series as an example, because it's Zelda, and Zelda is sometimes cartoony as well, but sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's very realistic. It really depends upon each version of the game, what's the art style that they want to follow, what's the game they want to make.

The other example I like to give is the new Battlestar Galactica series, which is vastly different from the original series, but I don't think anyone would argue that it is inferior in some way because of that. They pull enough from the original series to make it Battlestar Galactica, but they do a lot of things that make it something that is its own. That's really something that we wanted to do.

Eurogamer: Why do you think so few RPGs have gone with the isometric perspective - and why did you choose to stick with it?

Jay Wilson: I think people mistake camera view with technology. A lot of times people say - we had a few people, not very many but a few people in the company who said this - why do you even bother with a 3D engine if you're going isometric? That doesn't make any sense to me. A lot of people really saw it as a tech choice, and we saw it as a gameplay choice.

Because our industry is a technology industry and is very focused on innovation, there's this push to always advance. For us, yeah, we want to advance too, but the camera has nothing to do with that. The camera is a gameplay style, and a vastly unexplored gameplay style, especially with RPGs. It's so under-explored, and it makes for such good gameplay, it's so approachable, it's so eloquent.

This is the mistake I think a lot of developers make. They don't make it about the game they want. They make it about the tech they want to run, or the new engine, or the cut-scenes that they want to make. Somebody else asked: doesn't it restrict your scale and scope? Well, we use our cinematics for that, that's what they're for, that's why we make them, so that the game can be what it needs to be on its own.

So no, there was never a doubt. In my mind there was never a doubt that we were going to go isometric at all, it wasn't even under consideration, because it had to be Diablo. For me, that was one of those things - people look at the art style and say oh, they're not Diablo any more - if we'd come out and we weren't isometric, then I would agree with that.